The Glade 4.0

Its been my observation that most communities have some in jokes that get integrated into the culture, certainly those of us who work in IT are mostly familiar with PEBCAK errors and ID10T problems, my church certainly has gobs of jokes about itself mainly, but I've never seen an community with such a hard-core dedication to one particular form of humor as the astrophysics/astronomy community. Not exactly known for crazy hijinks, they still seem to have an ongoing competition to see who can come up with the most ridiculous acronym for their latest project/theory/device/satellite.


Many of you probably at least know about two areas of research in Dark Matter
WIMPs - Weakly Interacting Massive Particles
MACHOs- MAssive Compact Halo Objects

Someone actually collected most of them here:
https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~gpetitpas/ ... oacro.html


Clever:
ACBAR Arcminute Cosmology Bolometer Array Receiver ("It's a photon trap!")
OHANA Optical Hawaiian Array for Nanoradian Astronomy (A plan to join Mauna Kea optical observatories into one interferometer. Ohana is Hawaiian for 'family')

Particularly egregious:
GADZOOKS! Gadolinium Antineutrino Detector Zealously Outperforming Old Kamiokande, Super!
KINGFISH Key Insights on Nearby Galaxies: a Far-Infrared Survey with Herschel
PINTofALE Package for the INTeractive Analysis of Line Emission
TNTCAM Ten aNd Twenty Micron CAMera
WISEASS Weizmann Institute of Science Experimental Astrophysics Spectroscopy System
GALAPAGOS Galaxy Analysis over Large Areas: Parameter Assessment by Galfitting Objects from Sextractor
11HUGS 11 Mpc Halpha and Ultraviolet Galaxy Survey
FATBOY The Florida Analysis Tool Born of Yearning for high-quality scientific data
FLAMINGOS FLoridA Multi-object Imaging Near-infrared Grism Observational Spectrometer
HO-BAGS Hubble Observatory BAckground Galaxy Survey
2D-FRUTTI 2-D Photon Counting System
5MUSES 5 Mjy Unbiased Spitzer Extragalactic Survey

I like gene names. I got these from a newsletter at work (so can't link):

- Indy ("I'm not dead yet") - affects longevity, metabolism, and obesity

- Sonic Hedgehog - mutant fruit fly larvae look like hedgehogs

- Lava Lamp - Golgi bodies move like the wax in lava lamps

- Cheap Date/Amnesiac - mutants are extra sensitive to alcohol and have poor memory

- Amontillado - mutant larvae are alive, but can't hatch

- LSD1 LSD5 ("lesion simulating disease response") - mutants react to pathogens that aren't there

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When he's underwater does he get wet? Or does the water get him instead?